Windows 8 and VS2011 developer previews.

Have been busy this weekend checking out the keynotes and some sessions from the Microsoft Build conference last week. Microsoft has released a windows 8 developer preview and a Visual Studio 2011, .Net4.5 developer preview. So I've installed both products. VS11 is included in the 64bit Win8 developer preview, but only the win 8 only features are available and if you install the vs2011 on win7 you can't use the win8 features, So I installed Win8 on Virtualbox see some notes on virtual environment and VS2011 on my win7 machine. I've have made some initial testing:
First Windows 8, the new metro style start page feels like it's spot on when using touch-screens. There is also a mouse and keyboard integration, I don't have touch-screen on my laptop, so I have only used the mouse and keyboard approach, it does not feel perfect though, specially in the metro style applications. In VS2011 you can build metro style applications using C++, C#/VB.Net and HTML/Javascript using the Windows Runtime API. The applications created can be suspended to save battery. A lot of the focus is to save battery time, The fact that Win8 will run on ARM devices, the web sockets support that will be built-in in IE10, IIS8, Windows Runtime Client SDK, .Net4.5...

VS2011 and .Net4.5, .Net4.5 is an in-place update of .Net4.0, that mean that there can be compatibility problems, so any applications built in 4.0 should be tested carefully and as early as possible to avoid problems. .Net4.5 has been made faster. VS2011, the productivity Tools has been integrated into VS2011 also there has been a lot of work done so tools can be used without the need to switch context from the editor. Expression Blend now includes support for HTML and CSS making it easy to use the same Product for all GUI stuff.